Jake Wallis Simons (@JakeWSimons) is a Telegraph features writer, novelist and broadcaster. His website is jakewallissimons.com. Follow him on Facebook here and on Twitter here. His fourth novel, Jam, which is set in a traffic jam on the M25, is out now.

Are British children sleep-walking into Sodom and Gomorrah?

Lads' mags. Arguments can be made, and in recent days have been made, both for them and against them. It seems to me, however, that the underlying issue is impossible to deny: children these days are exposed to too much sex.

The sexual revolution, of course, was important and necessary. Few people want to turn back the clock and re-enter a world of 1950s repression. But quite self-evidently, our haste to abandon prudishness in all its forms, which has coincided with the collapse of religion, has allowed the pendulum to swing too far in the opposite direction. Any Friday night in a British city centre should provide evidence enough.

But here we are mainly talking about children. My daughter's school (like almost every other public institution, it seems) has embraced the Gangnam Style phenomenon. Kids of all ages can do the dance, and they all know the lyrics by heart. There is a problem, however: the line "wooooooo, sexy ladies". To hear a five-year-old sing these words is disconcerting, to say the least.

To their credit, the school have either evolved or devised a quite ingenious solution. My daughter comes home belting "wooooooo, Saxon ladies". (Which, as we live in Winchester, is particularly appropriate.)

But many schools are not as sensitive. I know of a little boy of Reception age who came back singing "I'm sexy and I know it", a tune he had learnt in dance class. Another little girl came home singing the playground ditty, "My boyfriend gives me apples, / My boyfriend gives me pears, / My boyfriend gives me a kiss on the lips, / And throws me down the stairs". Given the context of women being threatened with rape on Twitter, the scourge of child porn and the worrying "sexting" trend, one would have expected a school to take a zero tolerance approach to such rhymes.

This is the first movement. The second, higher up the age range, has children sending each other pictures of their genitals, having casual sex at an alarmingly young age, taking internet porn as a template for sexual activity, binge drinking, and generally degrading themselves without any notion of the value of what they are throwing away. The final movement, as we have seen, involves plump orange women urinating in the street outside bars in Cardiff town centre.

The question, of course, is what to do about it. Admittedly, lads' mags may not be the most important front on which to fight this war; then again, one has to start somewhere.

This is, after all, a wholly new problem. Never in the history of the world has a society had to formulate a set of moral standards without recourse to religious guidance, and implement them in a way that contradicts neither liberalism nor the beneficial legacy of a sexual revolution.

So there will be false starts, and mistakes, and moments of dirigiste idiocy. And it must be acknowledged that although this trend is alarming, it is not ubiquitous. Nevertheless, we must stop patting ourselves on the back for being so right-on and open-minded, and take some action to prevent our children from sleepwalking into Sodom and Gomorrah.